Honeybee (the other side of the glass)

author’s note: this piece delves into the struggles queer love, identity, and secrecy.

Jackie, 1997

If anyone ever bothered enough to ask me when my first recollection of love was, I’d instantly be brought back to the summer of 1987.

It was hot - terribly so - and I was working in one of those humiliatingly shabby record shops downtown. I didn’t even have a wildly extensive knowledge of music; I liked Madonna, as I assume every twenty-year-old girl must have at the time, and anything else with a bit of noise. The job didn’t take a vast amount of patience - that’s why I liked it. I wasn’t getting paid nearly enough to put myself through school, but being infamously stubborn has its few pros, and having the capability to simply ‘make it work’, is one of them.

I lived in a horribly stuffy apartment on a street corner of Chicago that my mother certainly would never approve of - she was always far too “posh” to cooperate with a bit of grime. However, in spite of all the cacophony of the area and the delusions of the building’s other residents, my apartment was rather comfortable - sweet, in a way.

It was sweet because Joni made it so.

Joni referred to herself in most instances as simply my roommate, although we both knew that her pedestal in my narrative was lifted much higher than that. She was freshly twenty-one with strawberry blonde hair that waved itself inwards at the ends, curling just above her delicate collarbones. Her flyaways were plentiful, as well as the freckles that bombarded the bridge of her rounded nose, appearing especially dark under the relentless august sun. She was a breath of fresh air in my dampened lungs that were filled with cigarette smoke and the unforgiving soot of the city.

I believe she originally moved in with me because she saw no other practical offer; I often ponder how silly she must’ve felt when she realized she was in love with me.

She had relocated to my side of town during the previous summer of ‘86, on a rather large whim of pure desperation to move out of her father’s house. She couldn’t stomach his mere presence; she never could. She hated the way her mother scraped her submissive tongue against the upper-edge of his boot, clinging to every objectifying word he spat at her, and how her younger brother longed to live a life directly in his image; she knew his lifestyle amounted to nothing more but a grave facade held up only by his engorged ego.

I never built up the nerve to inquire just how she managed to live underneath his roof for nearly twenty years, but I figure it’s a matter of her skin being made of hypothetical leather. She dressed in fair colors and silky fabrics, but shit - it took quite a bit more than a degrading comment from a man to hurt her feelings.

I’m unsure if Joni was ever able to fully comprehend that she was indeed my first, and in essence my only love up to this point, so everything she said - and did - was balanced on my own internal tightrope between my world shattering at its very core, and..whatever you’d consider the opposite of that to be. This concept was something that, despite the many attempts I made to gesture it into her perspective, I could never solidly see in the faint glimmer of her eyes that she understood.

It enraged me that someone who could present herself so delicately held virtually no empathy; or so I assumed for nearly the first year of our ‘relationship’. She kept me underground - hidden away beneath the sharpened end of her high heel. She’d come home, pool her clothes to the floor and tear mine away all in a hazed vision, only to act as if we slept in separate rooms the next morning.

I believe she was afraid; I don’t know of what, exactly. Perhaps what her friends would think - or her mother, who always bared a dangling cross against her aging chest. Our world is not one of solitude for girls like her; like us. I understood her fears, but what I couldn’t fathom was how easily indifferent she appeared to the emotions we so evidently shared.

We established a routine once our relationship had broken skin; we were nearly six months deep when she had begun to stop by the record shop every other afternoon to visit me during my lunch hour. On those days of the week I’d hoist myself up onto the counter top and gaze melodramatically out to the street, anxiously twiddling my thumbs together and awaiting her arrival. She’d come around the corner, her maxi skirt riding up to just above her knees in the wind, a semi-smile tugging at the corner of her pursed lips with a brown paper bag in hand, to which she never failed to label “honeybee” in permanent marker. She always took it upon herself to bring me enough food to hold me over for the rest of my shift - she knew how forgetful I could be with meals.

That was the best part of the day - seeing her earlier than 6 pm. I craved this simple act of attention; that is until she stripped it away in one, measly action.

I don’t recall what day, or even month it was - it must’ve been sometime in the fall with the cardigan she had nonchalantly draped around her porcelain shoulders as she fancied another woman into my workplace.

“She’s just a friend, what the hell are you so buzzed off about?!” she nearly shrieked when I confronted her, painting her cheeks a deep ruby hue of embarrassment and anger. I so terribly wanted to believe her, God, I did, but the lie was deeply laced within her seemingly innocent voice. In the moment I couldn’t even begin to formulate a halfway decent response to her shouting; all I could blankly ponder on was the way in which I felt my stomach plunge far below my abdomen when Joni touched her “friend” in the same, gentle ways she would touch me when we were alone. I recall beginning to sputter and stumble over my words, attempting to convey something in relation to how unacceptable so many of her flawed proceedings had been. She fell to her knees and pressed the side of her face against my stomach - someone who I could never picture as the groveling type, was doing just so. She weeped so heavily that I began to worry that she might make herself ill as an incoherent mess of words spewed out from between her quivering lips.

I heard her apologize for the cheating, the secrecy, the pain - everything that up until that point, I had no insight that she was self-aware of. She begged me to forgive her - to say something, anything. I told her to leave. It took me another three weeks to face her properly; to sit with her, wedged awkwardly in the corner of a nearly bare coffee shop, and openly seek the point in our relationship in which everything began to fall apart. She admitted to me there that she couldn’t release the fears she held in regards to telling those whom it concerned about who she really was - about who I was to her - and we became a painfully staggered book that was harshly slammed to a close.

I loved her; I still do. It’s a sensation that even after ten years, I may never be rid of. Perhaps I’ll never make peace with the other side of the glass.